It's the system, stupid
I don’t believe in bad people. I believe in bad systems. And I’ve spent years inside one of the most visible symptoms of ours — global production networks.
I want to start with what I could see from the outside before I was inside it.
For my master’s thesis, I interviewed people across a production network — brands, suppliers, intermediaries. I was outside the system looking in, and from that position I could see the whole shape of it: how responsibility moved through the network not toward whoever had the power to act on it, but toward whoever was most vulnerable to pressure. How every actor was responding rationally to the incentives in front of them. How nobody was the villain. How the outcomes were terrible anyway, obvious through the words used, like audit terrorism.
I finished that thesis in January 2022. In February, I started full-time as a product manager at a company building a platform for supply chain transparency. And something happened that I only understood later, looking back: I stopped being able to see the whole shape. I became a piece of the system I had just been studying. I interviewed brands. I built features for them, not for changing the system, making it better like I initially wanted to. I heard about supplier pain refracted through the people who were paying for the platform — never directly, not anymore. The architecture of the role pulled my gaze in one direction, and I, shaped by years of learning to fit rather than to challenge, followed it.
I was doing my best. Which, looking back, is the terrifying part.
The standard reading of supply chain problems goes like this: there are bad actors. Companies that exploit. Brands that look away. Factories that pay auditors to put the right answer, to just not let the children work during audit days. Expose them, pressure them, regulate them hard enough — and things will improve.
I used to half-believe this. It’s satisfying. It gives you a villain, which means it gives you a solution.
But I’ve been too close to reality for too long. The sustainability manager isn’t looking away because she doesn’t care — she’s one person managing due diligence across hundreds of suppliers, under pressure by deadlines to finish the report and from procurement not to disrupt the supplier relationship because it is and always has been under pressure by price negotiations. The tools she has to gather data for all those reports she needs to write weren’t built for the actual complexity she’s facing. The factory manager isn’t falsifying audits out of malice — he’s answering fourteen different questionnaires from fourteen different clients with similar questions just differently posed, each in a different format, none of them offering support in return, while also running production, managing HR, and keeping the lights on. The worker filling in the compliance survey is doing it fast because she’s afraid her output will drop and her salary with it.
Nobody is the villain. The system produces these outcomes with remarkable consistency across companies, countries, decades. That’s not bad luck. That’s design.
This is the diagnosis that is harder to sit with than any single bad actor would be.
Because if there’s a villain, you can expose them, catch them. You can regulate them. You can wait for the next scandal to shift the pressure. But if the system is working exactly as designed — rewarding extraction, externalising harm, delegating responsibility to actors who don’t have the means to act on it — then no investigation is coming to save us. No exposure. No new law, on its own, is enough.
The European regulatory wave is trying. LkSG, CSDDD, ESPR — I follow all of it; I believe in parts of it. But regulation creates floors, and floors get gamed. And the harder question never gets answered in a compliance report: who actually has the means and the mandate to change what’s happening, and what would it take to give them the room to use it?
Here’s what I keep coming back to, though. A system built by humans can be redesigned by humans. That’s not optimism — it’s structural logic. The rules of the current system weren’t handed down by nature. They were designed, iterated, and reinforced by choices. Which means they can be changed by different choices made by people willing to look honestly at who the system is currently working for, who is sitting at the table, who is getting asked, and who is being heard and who isn’t.
That requires something most compliance processes are not built for: actually asking the people inside the system what they see. Not surveying them. Not auditing them. Asking them. Sitting with the complexity of what they answer. And then redesigning not around the loudest voice or the biggest client, but around what would actually make the whole thing work.
I know this is possible because I’ve seen what happens when the angle shifts — in my thesis interviews, in the moments inside product development when someone finally asked the right question of the right person. The shape of the problem changes completely. Solutions that looked impossible start to look obvious.
Everybody is doing their best. That’s not an excuse for the system. It’s the strongest possible argument for changing it.